Comfort Reading

[rushthatspeaks]

Since I've been violently ill, I've been doing a little comfort reading, which in this case specifically means that I am about a quarter of the way through Queen's Play by Dorothy Dunnett for the umpteenth time, and will probably go on to finish the entire series. And this gets me thinking about comfort reading, and what it is and what it does, because I could be wrong, but I don't think that Dunnett traditionally is comfort reading, and until this illness she hadn't been for me.

A lot of the things I read for comfort are things that I have seen others mention as comfort reading as well, things that seem to have some soothing or helpful quality in general: Georgette Heyer, James Herriot, portions of Lois McMaster Bujold and Terry Pratchett, Bridge of Birds, and so on. On the other hand, there are some things I know other people read for comfort that I am absolutely incapable of thinking of in that way-- Dorothy Sayers, for instance; Gaudy Night always puts me back together again, but only after emotionally taking me apart to an extent I can't really deal with very frequently. And there are some things I find intensely comforting and soothing that I get odd reactions from other people about, such as the fact that if I am having a very bad day indeed nothing will put me right faster than a good dose of back-catalogue Lovecraft. 'The Horror at the Museum' was instrumental in getting me through my paternal grandmother's funeral.

So, what does comfort reading do? What makes it comforting?

I think the most important factor of it, for me, is familiarity. A book cannot be comfort reading on first go-through. Even if it is acting that way in mid-swing, it might do something at or near the end to totally destroy its usefulness in that regard, and so on first reading I do not trust a book enough to put it into the comfort reading category. So: no surprises, or at least no really shocking ones-- I may not have read a book recently enough to remember all the details, but I know I won't find them objectionable.

Secondly: a certain distancing from the cares and worries of my everyday life. This is why I cannot read Gaudy Night for comfort-- I have enough trouble with, I worry enough about sexism and gender presentation and the philosophical ideology of womens' colleges and the existence of roles in marriage etc. on a day-to-day basis that that book is flicking me on the raw points. But with Heyer, for example, I am hopefully never again going to be eighteen and stupid, and I am certainly never going to be eighteen and stupid in a delightfully non-existent version of Regency England. I am also never going to be a country vet, involved in sixteenth-century Scottish intrigue, or Number Ten Ox. I mean, anymore than one is when one reads the books, which is certainly quite a lot, but not in an entirety.

In addition, I am never going to be the doomed protagonist in a Lovecraftian universe, and that particular piece of knowledge is by itself so reassuring that it has lifted me out of many slumps.

Thirdly: characters or situations I can care about despite the aforesaid distancing. See Dunnett: I am not personally or professionally involved with sixteenth-century Scottish intrigue, but I certainly find it fascinating, and I love her people, as an aggregate, the chivalry and the pragmatism and the acceptance of mortality in places that modernity no longer expects it; and of course I have always had a weakness for bishounen (god Lymond would look good in an anime). And I care about the welfare of animals, and, somehow, for Lovecraft's poor doomed protagonists, and about Number Ten Ox.

Fourth and lastly: a certain intricacy or depth of worldbuilding. I have to be able to read the thing over and over and still get something different out of it. This is one reason Lovecraft is so good, as the meta-game of tracing the interconnections of the various names of nasties and the various references to non-existent books and what-have-you is an unending delight. Solidity in a book provides something for the mind to lean against in times of trouble.

So, what do you all read for comfort? Why? And, most particularly, what do you read for comfort that you don't think other people would expect to be comforting?

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

War for the Oaks, Bone Dance, or the Bordertown books are my comfort reading. They got me through a lot of hard times and I tend to reach for them when I need to feel better. When I was younger, being sick in bed meant re-reading the first two McCaffrey Pern trilogies. I'm not sure other people would find any of those comforting, but I have my reasons.

[gwynnega]

Sylvia Plath's journals have been comfort reading for me. Also Marge Piercy's novel Vida (about a Weatherman-type woman living underground).

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of the usuals. Not sure what would be unusual, possibly eighteen and nineteenth century diaries and letters. Bujold is now a comfort read, and so is Patrick O'Brian, but that's after several reads.

What you say about new books can't be comfort reads is a great observation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I was doing exclusively comfort reading at the start of PT hell, it was Bujold and Sayers, Sayers and Bujold, a solid fortnight of nothing else.

I had lent lots of my favorite children's and YA to snurri, so I couldn't do a sequential reread of the Westmark trilogy or dduane's Young Wizards.

But I discovered that while my need for comfort reading has not decreased, my ability to have it function at all no matter what it is tapers off after 2-4 weeks. If a problem goes on longer than that (and the current six months and counting is certainly longer!), I can't go pick up Taltos (skzbrust, not Anne Rice) or War for the Oaks and have it work, even though those are solid, unimpeachable comfort reads for me. The fact of comfort reading itself runs out. Reading new things that might become comfort reading in the future seems to be a good project, though, hence Amanda Cross's mystery series, and before it Sarah Caudwell's, and Hilary McKay's Casson family books.

[bummble.livejournal.com]

(here via Sartorias)

For me, books read for the first time can be comfort reading, as long as they're predicable: Pratchett is great, and I like the Southern Vampire books and the China Bayles mysteries for that as well.

Lovecraft works for me too, as do Gothic-ish ghost stories: M. R. James, Le Fanu, etc. There's something about the gentle pace and generally undemanding plot that really works.

[kilerkki.livejournal.com]

(here via sartorias, btw)

My experience may be fairly narrow, but I've discovered at least one genre--and it is almost an entire genre--that can furnish both first reads and comfort reads at the same time. It's the Western, for several reasons. One is purely emotional; my earliest encounters with Western novels were at home, and they were books my father liked and read, and so whenever I read a Western I'm automatically in a Safe Place, and can connect even more with that Safe Place by passing a new, good read on to my dad.

Furthermore, the conventions of the genre are such that I know what I'm in for, and what I'll get out of it. Reading a Louis L'Amour or a Luke Short is rather like reading an Agatha Christie, that way. There are certain formulae that must be followed: there must be, for example, a hero who is worthy of respect and a properly villainous villain, a girl more or less in distress, a conflict that usually pits the lone but intrepid hero against an overwhelming force, several rousing episodes of hard riding and gunplay, a fistfight, and a culminating showdown. It's formulaic, certainly, but that's part of what makes it comfortable. The Good Guys always win!

And when you're depressed and angsty and possibly even angry, it's awfully nice to read about cowboys and guns and a morality that seldom comes in shades of grey.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Also here via sartorias:

I find Dunnett a comfort read now that I'm familiar with her, too (though I tend to gravitate toward the Johnson Johnson mysteries rather than Lymond). Also Lewis and Tolkien and Sayers, and Mary Stewart's suspense novels, and Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and more recently Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books... I think Elizabeth Wein's Telemakos books might become comfort reads in time as well, though like Dunnett and Whalen Turner I was far too much on edge with suspense to find them comforting the first time around.

Speaking of bishounen Lymond, agreed on the anime thing. Though I always picture him as Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, to the extent that I seriously would be surprised if Dunnett hadn't been similarly inspired herself.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely chewy post. Thank you.

I think the most important factor of it, for me, is familiarity. A book cannot be comfort reading on first go-through. Even if it is acting that way in mid-swing, it might do something at or near the end to totally destroy its usefulness in that regard, and so on first reading I do not trust a book enough to put it into the comfort reading category.

I dont know that I would put that as "trust", exactly. Or rather, ongoing plot tension, while a good thing, cuts against comfort reading, the first time. This may well be related to how much better I am at reading for how plot tension is achieved on subsequent readings. My thoughts on whether I trust an author will tend to be fairly solid well before the end of a book - if I have read a significant body of their work, it may be quite close to the beginning - but I may well be using "trust" at a different scale here.

Secondly: a certain distancing from the cares and worries of my everyday life. This is why I cannot read Gaudy Night for comfort-- I have enough trouble with, I worry enough about sexism and gender presentation and the philosophical ideology of womens' colleges and the existence of roles in marriage etc. on a day-to-day basis that that book is flicking me on the raw points.

I don't know about the distancing. On the one hand, away from a certain scale of and set of daily cares, definitely, but on the other hand, I am unlikely to find something a satisfying comfort read unless it engages honestly and well with something I care about to some extent; also, an awful lot of what I consider comfort reading is comforting at least in part because of how superlatively technically well done it is (yes, it is after all possible to do this, and this, and this, with words), and aspiring to such, and musing on how it works, is both part of the experience of the comfort read and something that's in my mind a lot day to day.

In addition, I am never going to be the doomed protagonist in a Lovecraftian universe, and that particular piece of knowledge is by itself so reassuring that it has lifted me out of many slumps.

I am not one hundred per cent sure that in my deepest heart I could believe that was the case enough to take comfort from it. I certainly count among my regular comfort reads such books as Use of Weapons and Random Acts of Senseless Violence, which are a very long way from uplifting tone-wise, because they are just so damned good and affecting. This is not true for all my comfort books, though the good hopeful-but-not-implausibly-happy ending [ as frex The Armageddon Rag ] tends to resonate for me more and be more uplifting than the "everyone living happily ever after and getting chocolate cake and ponies" scale of happy ending, just because the former is something I can believe in in the real world.

Thirdly: characters or situations I can care about despite the aforesaid distancing.

I may yet just give up on figuring out what makes people care about characters, because I am so totally unable to map how this works for anyone else onto how it does for me; "sympathetic" really doesn't seem to be part of it as anyone else judges that, though "not an idiot" is pretty close to universal.

Fourth and lastly: a certain intricacy or depth of worldbuilding. I have to be able to read the thing over and over and still get something different out of it.

Oh yes, definitely; which is why The Dragon Waiting is probably the best comfort book in my life, and why I find myself every few years drawn back to The Ring Master despite its stunning weirdness and lumbering nature (though not quite often enough to call it a comfort book, exactly; besides if I did papersky's head might explode.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Related thought, thrown out for comment; does anyone else have books they think might become comfort reads, that they have read only once or twice and are not sure about yet ?

I do, definitely. Right now Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes is one, for example. It's rich, it's chewy, it's beautifully well done, and I have only read it once and do not have enough of it installed in my head to know whether it's going to get that emotional weight or not.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Also here vis sartorias

Sayers is very much a comfort read of mine, as is War for the Oaks, Robin McKinley's Sunshine, most Mary Stewarts, and several of Guy Gavriel Kay's books (not Tigana, which is a little too emotionally wrenching to be a comfort read - I put it in the catharsis section, along with Connie Willis' Lincoln's Dreams). I also read L.M. Montgomery, Judith Merkle Riley, and Bujold. Plus, I'll frequently pick up a Travis McGee book (by John D. MacDonald) if in need for something action-y enough to distract me but well-written so I don't get irritated - and if I pick up one, I usually end up reading five of them. I guess the biggest thing about all of these books is that I've read them a bajillion times so I can fall into them.

I also like history for soothing reading - I guess I like the distance from my own problems. I usually go to John Julius Norwich's books on Byzantium and Venice, or Caroline Walker Bynum or some travel writing on Italy like On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti or Italian Neighbors/An Italian Education by Tim Parks.

[navrins]

For mood purposes, Spider Robinson is comfort reading for me. His stories almost always give me such a good burst of "look how goddamned good people can be" that it's hard to maintain a depressed outlook through them.

Bujold and Brust are certainly good too, and James White, and some earlier Niven - but they're good comfort reading mostly because they're just good reading. Robinson I find a good antidepressant independent of the quality of the writing itself.

[sovay]

Catullus. Also Euripides and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Go figure. In English, anything from Angela Carter to Patricia McKillip to Alan Garner; who are not mutually exclusive with Mary Stewart, Mary Renault, or Tanith Lee, who I think of as more traditional comfort reading. I tend to re-read solid favorites for comfort, which means This Rough Magic rather than The Ivy Tree, Riddle-Master rather than In the Forests of Serre, The Owl Service rather than The Moon of Gomrath, etc., and re-read experimentally when healthy and curious; although entire runs of an author or a series, like Ellis Peters' Cadfael or everything Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote, are more likely for comfort reasons than not. I noticed recently that for about a year I have been unable to read Lloyd Alexander, who used to be a regular revisit; I am hoping this is unrelated to his death, because it would suck extremely never to get near his work again. Conversely, after about a five-year gap, I've re-read most of my Mary Gentle in the last nine months; I have no idea what that signifies. I do not find new authors incompatible with comfort reading—if I can get someone else to pick the books up for me, I find libraries a useful recourse for sickness or generalized misery; maybe it's distraction in the form of a new obsession. If I wanted to re-read Anne McCaffrey, however, I'd have to make myself do it.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Being stunned with misery, I read almost nothing but comfort books in my adolescence (from 11 to 17 or so). This stunted me irreparably, I think.

Some of them are still comforting: Elizabeth Enright, A Little Princess, Daddy-Long-Legs (which was all about going off to school for me). Some of them have faded: Trilby.

Since then? Let's see: Sylvia Townsend Warner's letters, some of Guy Davenport's essays, Angela Carter, S.J. Perelman, P.G. Wodehouse, heaven help me, Angela Brazil. Either I want a happy ending--the long-lost orphan is discovered and beloved, the aspiring artist or dancer is applauded; or the words themselves are a charm, a pentacle against the ills and evils of the world.

I can't read romance at all.

Nine

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

LOL! See, I was thinking about this recently, and I'm not being cute here...the Bell Jar got me through the end of high school.

Yes, I see why reading it could make a person miserable, but those issues aren't my issues, and the voice that comes out of particularly the first quarter of it has this sense of humor that made me feel at home. She also is a master at conveying emotion with an apparently unrelated tangent.

Blanche Boyd does this all too...I'm not sure better but in a voice that's so familiar to me that I feel this aching loss that she hasn't yet written the third of the three in the series she planned. Oh, and Boyd does away with chronology, or at least gets really *interesting* with it, and I find that a comfort too.

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

The last time I was violently ill, I read White Boots by Noel Streatfeild, an old favourite from my childhood. I didn't have the energy to read anything that wasn't intimately familiar -- I have read White Boots many, many times -- but it had to be something I hadn't read recently. If I read a book too many times, it becomes stale and boring and loses its capacity to comfort. As soon as I became aware of this, I started rationing my re-reads; I want to hold them in reserve for when I need the comfort of something familiar-but-not-too-familiar.

If I'm just in a rotten mood rather than exhausted by illness, I tend to read BL manga -- the predictability of the romantic plots makes them very soothing to read, and they have that distancing effect; being neither a man nor Japanese, there's no danger of my coming across something that's supposed to represent me and very blatantly doesn't. BL being BL, it doesn't absolutely need to be something I've read before; there are certain BL authors I'm a bit leery of, because either their idea of a sweet romance is something horrifyingly close to Stockholm Syndrome, or they include all sorts of psychologically realistic twists and turns that make their manga more interesting to read when I'm in a good mood, but a lot less comforting when I'm not. (Some of them don't even have happy endings! Horrors!)

Edit: Actually, I've just realised something: I have a comfort watch that's probably only a comfort watch for me because I have no idea why I find it comforting: Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation) video game reviews. They're still funny the tenth time you watch them, and they're detailed and complicated enough that it takes that many views to pick up on all the little background gags. Despite being cynical, pessmistic, and generally negative, they always put me in a good mood.

[ckd]

Not really "comfort" reading so much as "cheery" reading: the Making Light thread on Hurra Torpedo.

It's like a benign textual version of those "reaction videos" you sometimes see on YouTube, where people are shown something horribly disgusting and are filmed while doing so.

[writegirl23.livejournal.com]

Bujold, Mckinley, Pratchett, Brust . . . it's interesting how there's a lot of repeats of favorite comfort authors. I think for a book to be a comfort read, it has to be complicated enough that there are always little pieces and connections that seem new each time you read it, so you can pick up on them and feel clever.

I think it's hard for anything that you've read before not to be comfort reading, at least a little. I know that when I come back from the library with ten never read books and three already read books, I tend to gravitate towards the ones I've already read, or by authors I know and slowly work my way into the unknowns. The exception for me would be the random nonfiction books about the most obscure subjects, where the author decides to discover the inside world of Scrabble championships, or birdwatching.

[octopedingenue]

Terry Pratchett is always comfort reading, even any new book now he's got Rincewind out of his system; the vet anecdotes of James Herriot; the plainspun domestica of the Little House on the Prairie books, especially the long descriptions of food in Farmer Boy; the long wandering treks in David Eddings' Belgariad. The first volume of Naruto. Pride & Prejudice and The Neverending Story, because I know them so well yet do not get bored with them when every time there's something new, a cutting phrase, a "That's another story, and it will be told another time," that leaps out to catch me.

What probably counts as oddball comfort food: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach never fails to make me laugh hysterically and nearly vomit, a combination that has proved invaluable; it is most of what got me through a spring break week I spent alone waiting to see if my cousin would die while I was out of school and could fly to the funeral. The Venom trilogy of Spider-Man novelizations by Diane Duane, because the weirdly domestic snarking among Spidey and MJ and Venom never fails to make me happy.

[larryhammer]

My current comfort reads include several by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small, Circle of Magic), several Heyer, Steven Gould (esp. Helm), Wodehouse (Blandings). The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Gardner ed.). Yotsuba&!.

---L.

[wakaba-chan.livejournal.com]

Georgette Heyer and Mr Pratchett are definitely old favourites for me, but I also find Jane Austen very comforting too. Judging by the response most people have to Austen, she isn't a very comforting author!

[nishatalitha.livejournal.com]

Also here via sartorias.

Comfort reads for me tend to be something I'm extremely familiar with and as someone said above (can't find the comment now, sorry), something I feel safe reading. Not a first time read, usually, but when I've reached the end of it, I'll usually know. Rereads, for example Jenny Maxwell's The Blacksmith trilogy or Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover aren't necessarily comfort books (I reread the former every three or four years and the latter about once a year).

Bujold is a comfort read, particularly The Curse of Chalion, Margaret Mahy's The Changeover, some Lackey, Diana Wynne-Jones' Hexwood, Fleur Beale's Slide The Corner</> and McKinley's Sunshine<.i>. I also have some favourite romances and fanfiction that I like to reread. Childhood favourites which I have sought out again and reread and when they have not failed me, were what I remembered them to be, will often become comfort reads.

My comfort reads have changed as I've grown older. I used to reread L J Smith's Nightworld or Secret Circle series on a regular basis. Ditto for Lackey. Jane Eyre was once upon a time, too. Apart from the fairly consistent inclusion of fantasy in the list, most of my comfort reads, the books I keep because I loved them, have changed over time.

Most importantly for me, I think a comfort read is a book I can linger over. I read very quickly - the first time I read Chalion for instance (and probably the second, third and fourth time), it only took me a couple of hours. It usually takes me half a dozen readings to be familiar enough with the story to be able to linger over it, and that ability to linger and appreciate the sheer craft involved, even as I sink into the story, is one of the things that makes a book a comfort read for me.

[eredien]

I read "Watership Down" for comfort after someone has died; I find it to be a very healing book, in part due to the realistic depiction of terror and pain.

My ultimate comfort book--and very possibly my favorite novel--is "The Alley," by Eleanor Estes. It describes a Brooklyn, NYC and an attitude toward the world so long gone now that it seems like a dream, and the modernization process by which that way of life was being destroyed even back then, but if the setting is the last days of a golden dream the characters are all sharp and real, sticking out of it like shadows; there is so much character momentum at the end of the book that if I bumped into Connie Ives I wouldn't be suprised, because it makes sense to me that her life continued on after the book--it was just in a place where I wasn't able to read about it.

I also read "King of the Wind" by Marguerite Henry, for comfort reading.

I also read cookbooks.